Fareed Zakaria, of course, is one of them. I couldn't even get beyond this line in his latest drivel:
Dick Cheney has accused Barack Obama of "dithering" over Afghanistan. I suppose if the president were to quickly invade a country on the basis of half-baked intelligence, that would demonstrate his courage and decisiveness to Mr. Cheney.
I'll not address the dithering issue. What gets me is the charge that President Bush invaded Iraq on the basis of half-baked intelligence. We debated invading Iraq from about the time of the fall of Kabul to fall 2002 when Congress voted to go to war. Then we waited until March to actually attack. That's quickly invading a country?
As for the half-baked intelligence issue, I suggest Mr. Zakaria take that up with the intelligence agencies of all the Western powers who believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I certainly believed Iraq had chemical weapons and if given time would develop nuclear weapons. I had no idea of the status of biological weapons. We were apparently wrong about the WMD issue, but to suggest this was anything but the best judgment of all the leading intelligence agencies is ludicrous. But this is Fareed Zakaria, so I expect no less.
Lawrence Korb is another leading star in the fantasy-based intelligentsia. Check this out:
If the planning on how to go into Iraq was as good as the planning on how to get out, we would not have created such a big mess in 2003 after we invaded under false pretenses with no plan on what to do the second day we were there.
Ah, the no-planning charge. Plus we invade on a false pretense as Zakaria implies. And we created the mess. First, the Baathists created the mess. They started shooting up the place and called on their jihadi imports to help out. Second, there was no false pretense. The declaration of war on Iraq was based on a whole list of problems with his regime, and WMD was only one (albeit the one we emphasized believing it to be the strongest and most ironclad charge). We were apparently wrong about that charge, but the rest hold true. There was no false pretense.
And we certainly had a plan for the post-war. Heck, we even had a plan to build democracy in Iraq--it was never an after-the-fact justification for invasion after we failed to find new chemical weapons in Iraq. Don't believe me? Read the New York Times, then:
President Bush's national security team is assembling final plans for administering and democratizing Iraq after the expected ouster of Saddam Hussein. Those plans call for a heavy American military presence in the country for at least 18 months, military trials of only the most senior Iraqi leaders and quick takeover of the country's oil fields to pay for reconstruction.
The proposals, according to administration officials who have been developing them for several months, have been discussed informally with Mr. Bush in considerable detail. They would amount to the most ambitious American effort to administer a country since the occupations of Japan and Germany at the end of World War II. With Mr. Bush's return here this afternoon, his principal foreign policy advisers are expected to shape the final details in White House meetings and then formally present them to the president.
Many elements of the plans are highly classified, and some are still being debated as Mr. Bush's team tries to allay concerns that the United States would seek to be a colonial power in Iraq. But the broad outlines show the enormous complexity of the task in months ahead, and point to some of the difficulties that would follow even a swift and successful removal of Mr. Hussein from power, including these: ...
Huh. Plans. Who knew?
The problem isn't that we didn't plan. The problem is that our plan didn't survive contact with the enemy. Our assumptions were wrong.
So to review. We had many reasons to overthrow the Saddam regime. Indeed, there was bi-partisan consensus that Saddam had to go until about early 2004.
We may not have found WMD in Iraq, but Saddam was hardly innocent and not even the current anti-Iraq War people believe he was innocent. I don't think we've written the final chapter on that issue, in any case.
One of our assumptions for the post-war that didn't hold was that we could use a de-Baathified Iraqi army to police a largely peaceful Iraq. But the Iraqi army self-disbanded during the war.
That was one of many assumptions that didn't hold--but that's a far cry from saying we didn't have ideas about what would happen after we won the conventional war. Did you read that Times article?
The anti-war side tosses in these falsehoods as casual asides hoping nobody will notice the lie as they move on to the main issue of the article. By this tactic they hope to change the history. But the archives remain. And the truth is still there if we will remember it.
Shame on Zakaria and Korb. They're free to disagree over policy, but revising the facts of history is dishonest. Indeed, it's half-baked
